By Vincent Khan
The series centers on college dropout and music manager Earnest “Earn” Marks (Glover) and rapper Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) as they climb the Atlanta rap scene. It also stars Lakeith Stanfield (Darius, Paper Boi’s best friend) and Zazie Beetz (Van, Earn’s mother of his child/ex-girlfriend). The last episode of season 2 shows Earn, Darius, and Paper Boi in the airport on their way to Europe for Paper Boi’s European tour.
Disclaimer: The rapper makes it big within the first two seasons, this is not a struggle story.
Throughout the series, there will be side episodes that don’t have anything to do with the main characters of the series but take place in their world, with those episodes each having an underlying message.
Season 3 starts with one of these episodes. It begins with two men fishing late at night on a boat. The white guy tells the Black guy that the lake they’re fishing on is haunted because the lake’s location is actually where an independent Black town used to be. Still, the government made a dam, and whoever was in the city died from the flooding when the barrier was being made. Now thousands of souls are looking for more souls to feed on.
Then it cuts to a Black child waking up in class to his teacher saying they will see the new Black Panther 2 movie. The kid jumps on his desk and dances out of enjoyment to see the film. It then cuts to the principal’s office, where the child’s mother and grandfather hear about the child’s disruption in class.
The mother and grandfather discipline the child in a way that raises eyebrows, and the next day at home, Child Protective Services shows up, and he is placed in a new home. Two lesbian mothers run the new house, and they have already adopted three other Black children other than the main character.
Throughout the rest of the episodes, there are cultural differences between the two white mothers and the three Black children. The kids hate living there because they are forced to eat sparingly because the parents claim that if “they are full, they have overeaten.” The food is nothing they should be eating health-wise, but the parents truly just want to give them the best life.
This episode also emphasizes weird things that white and Black people do. One of them was when the kid first came into the home, he asked for a washcloth to wash his face, and the one mother exclaimed to just “use your hands.”
This joke is mainly poking a stick at Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunas, who said they only take showers weekly and only wash their kids when they look dirty. Also, when the child first entered the home, he was given a towel sewn by one of the mothers, but it was a shortened down Americanized version of his name.
MANY, many more social discrepancies are littered throughout the episode, pointing out Black vs. white weirdness, but you’re going to have to check out the series for yourself.
But I will say at the end of the episode. It turns into both mothers planning to crash the car with all of the kids because they realize they are not fit enough to raise these kids.
Thankfully all of the kids jump out of the vehicle before the parents drive it off a bridge into the same lake the two men fishing were talking about at the beginning of the episode. They felt ashamed yet so confused.
Being lesbian parents, all they wanted was to raise a family, run a home, the usual stuff. But the area they live in never allowed lesbians to adopt, forcing them to forge paperwork to adopt the kids, which butterflied into mayhem within the episode. If only gay couples were given the freedom of adopting, this would have never happened.
